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041 _afre
042 _adc
100 1 0 _aHamou, Philippe
_eauthor
245 0 0 _aGulliver’•s Travels in Perspective
260 _c2007.
500 _a57
520 _aSwift’s masterpiece, Gulliver’s travels, one of the most pregnant and paradoxical contributions to the Battle of Ancients and Moderns, offers a pessimistic view on modernity and modern science. Values of the ancient world such as wisdom, simplicity and good proportion have now become inaccessible ideals. The disproportion between man and his surroundings, the contingency and artificiality of his perspective on the world, the indefinite extension of the universe are inescapable features of modernity. This philosophical view is subtly expressed in Gulliver’s travels narrative through the use of a threefold optical model: artificial perspective (Leon Battista Alberti) offers a principle of relativity; philosophical optics (George Berkeley) accounts for the artificiality of our acquaintance with the visual world, showing that it is actually built out of habits and experience; instrumental optics(microscopic-eyes, Robert Hooke, Nicolas Malebranche) suggests that the universe to which science and its instruments give access is not fitted to human life.
690 _aJonathan Swift
690 _aLeon Battista Alberti
690 _amicroscopic-eyes
690 _amodernity
690 _aoptics
690 _aperspective
690 _aphilosophical anthropology
786 0 _nRevue d’histoire des sciences | Volume 60 | 1 | 2007-08-01 | p. 25-45 | 0151-4105
856 4 1 _uhttps://shs.cairn.info/journal-revue-d-histoire-des-sciences-2007-1-page-25?lang=en&redirect-ssocas=7080
999 _c1729134
_d1729134